


A Tale Of Two Sisters

by tielan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Friendship, Gen, Trope: Fork in the Road
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 13:51:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12255675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: Pepper doesn’t want adventure or a reward or heroism. She just wants to survive and live the best life she can.





	A Tale Of Two Sisters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [finnimbrand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnimbrand/gifts).



> This was my original idea for finnimbrand's request in the MCU AUfest 2017, only it got kind of epic in execution, so I gifted her with something a little more concise. There's still potential for Epic in this, but this can be whole and complete as it is.
> 
> Also for my square "Fork In The Road" in the [2017 Trope Bingo](https://tielan.dreamwidth.org/1036734.html).

In the time when all stories are told, there lived a girl with red hair.

When first her hair dried, after that first bathing after birth, and the potter beheld his daughter, he was excited. “My grandmother had red hair like flame, and she was a witch of heath and briar, known through the towns. Perhaps this daughter has been sent to us to bring us good fortune at last.”

His wife did not answer, both exhausted by the birth and wondering at the babe’s dainty hands, and the strength in them as they beat at her breast to bring her mother’s milk.

But the child’s hair did not inherit the promise of her foremother. As she grew, it turned not a fiery red, like the glowing coals of the blacksmith’s forge, but the merest tinge of sunrise. She brought no particular fortune to her parents, only intelligence and industry as she learned to read and write from her mother, and organise her father’s work commissions.

With such a daughter might many men have been content.

But bitterness and jealousy lingered in the heart of the potter, an eagerness for that which was beyond both reach and skill, and his heart was hardened towards his daughter. Nothing was ever good enough to be approved without criticism, no work done so well that it could be praised unstinting.

So might the girl have grown, resentful at all that was not, but for her mother.

She was a woman of great empathy and kindness, who had learned much and loved beneath her. And she protected her daughter, praised her, raised her to understand that humility was not a failing, and contentment was not a curse, and that money and wealth could not buy happiness.

“Look at our Lord and his Lady,” she would tell her daughter by the last light of day, when the sky streaked bright behind the tower on the distant hill. “They have every comfort in the world, but the Lord lives under a cloud and takes no joy from the lands or the people, only tinkering with his pieces, day and night without cease.”

“But why?”

“Because many years ago, before he married the Lady or his son was born, the Lord crossed a powerful fairy. In her anger, she wreaked a vengeance on him, that his connection with the land – the bond of soil and tree, sky and fire – might be severed. He would be the wealthiest in the land but take no pleasure in his riches; he would be the master of many peoples and yet be trapped within himself; and betrayal would strike him and that which he loved most down in the end.”

“Did the Lady tell you that when you served her last summer, Mama?”

“Not as such.” Her mother smiled. “But I heard a few things while I was up at the keep, and servants gossip. And,” she added, pushing back the delicate reddish curls, “little children must sleep when the sun goes down.”

Tucked in and on the verge of sleep, the girl pondered the story. “Can the curse be lifted?”

Her mother’s needles clicked lightly together as she knit in the chair by the door. “If it can, nobody knows.”

–

Her parents die in the plague that takes most of the town when she’s twelve, and she remembers little of the hard scrabble for food and survival in the weeks following.

She remembers the day the Starks arrive, though.

Guards march through the town, flanking the Lady Stark on her grey palfrey, her pale hair braided and bound up around her brow. In contrast, her son sits his seat like a man grown, although his voice cracks a little as he issues orders to his men, on the advice of a middle-aged retainer and his mother.

One by one, the houses are called and marked off on the tax rolls, and the remaining inhabitants of the houses are counted.

“Pots-maker,” reads the advisor from the rolls as the girl stands on her stoop. “Ashlen and Ginevra. Your parents?”

“Dead.” She doesn’t weep anymore, but holds herself proud. If her tunic is still damp, it’s as clean as she could wash it, and her trews are patched, but neat. “I request work at the keep, sir. I’m old enough to earn my bread.”

He eyes her, his expression doubtful, but she lifts her chin and perhaps something of her pride comes through, for he shrugs. “There’s too many mouths to feed as it is, child.”

A horse canters up, its hooves thudding playfully in the dirt of the street. “Jarvis? There are another four streets still to go in this section. What’s the wait?”

“An appeal for work, Master Stark.”

The young Lord looks at her, tilting his head. “Is she old enough to take service?”

“I’m twelve!”

Too late, she realises she should have held her tongue, but he grins.

“Old enough to sass, clearly! Wasn’t Ana complaining that there weren’t any girls sharp enough to take over as chatelaine? Why not train her up?”

Jarvis looks at her and hesitates, his mouth twisting. The young lord looks from one to the other, then laughs. “Oh, father taught me not to bed them unwilling, Jarvis. And if she’s chatelaine, she’ll be off-limits anyway.”

“As though that ever stopped you.” But the advisor has things to do and other parts of town to oversee, and he jerks his head at her. “Gather your things then, child. Leave nothing behind you can’t do without. Your father’s remaining pottery work will go towards your studies at the keep.”

And just like that, her life is changed.

She’s not the only orphan going up to the keep, but she’s one of the most self-possessed. There’s no point in weeping, and while she’ll hold the memory of her parents close, they’re gone, and she’s alone. The other calm child in the group is a girl she recognises as the blacksmith’s runner-girl, although not his daughter. Blue eyes study the other occupants of the cart beneath sharp, dark brows, and her dark hair is firmly tucked up beneath a frayed kerchief.

Their eyes meet, and the girl shuffles over along the side of the cart to make room.

“All comfortable, sassy Pot-maker?” The young lord sits on his stallion, a few yards away. His smile invites her to laugh with him, but her dignity is too aware of the other children staring, whispering, wondering.

“I thank you, yes, my lord.”

He grins and rides off, and the blacksmith’s runner-girl gives her a sidewise look. “You know the Starks?”

“No. But I think he got me a place up at the keep.”

The other girl nods, then sticks out a small and blocky hand. “Maria.”

“Pepper.”

–

Life is very different up at the keep.

Pepper is apprenticed to Madame Jarvis.

“Call me Ana when there aren’t other servants to see,” she tells Pepper frankly. “I’ll allow it then, but you must show respect otherwise. Familiarity may be permitted on occasion, but you need the discernment to judge when is appropriate. A great deal of this job is about discernment.”

Up to her arms in dirty dishwater, scrubbing the inedibly burned bits at the bottom of the big cookpot, Pepper thinks that there’s not much discernment in this task and says as much to Maria, who’s pulled the same duty.

“Maybe not washing dishes,” the other girl says as she inspects the base of a pan. “But other tasks require it.”

“What kind of other jobs?”

“Oh, protection of the keep, looking after the land, things like that.”

Maria doesn’t talk much about the work she does – they’ve sent her to the armourer because of her work with the blacksmith, but she’s not an apprentice so far as Pepper can tell. Most of the time, Pepper sees Maria out and about the keep bailey, and once with the hunters coming in from the forest, a sheathed knife hanging on her rope belt.

“Do you like what you’re doing?”

“Right now? Not particularly.” Maria smiles as Pepper nudges her. “I’m learning things. Interesting things.”

“But?”

Maria is silent as she carefully balances the pan on the rack between them. “I think they’re waiting for something. Or for someone.”

There’s a commotion over by the master’s stairs – the ones leading directly up to the family quarters, and they both glance over, to find a well-dressed servant holding an tray of empty dishes and arguing with the cook.

“He wants more.” Even as Pepper watches, the tray is whisked out of his hands by a server and unloaded over at the sink where the nobility’s dishes are washed.

“There is no more!”

“Then you’d better hop to it and find something.”

“It wasn’t even proper food – just the last of the broken meats, the off-cuts that usually go in the stew!”

“Well, he ate it all and asked for more. That hasn’t happened in an age and a half. Work something out.”

As the cook puts something together, Maria looks at Pepper. “The men in the guardshouse talk about the Stark curse – a lot of rumour and fuss and bother – but I’ve never seen any sign of it.”

“I’ve never seen the north wind blowing down the mountains,” Pepper quotes one of Ana’s aphorisms, “And yet we have snow.”

Maria scowls. “If you can’t tell me what’s going on, then just say so.”

Pepper thinks of the murmured conversations she’s overheard between Ana and Edwin, of the concern that pinches Lady Stark’s mouth, of the young lord’s increasingly reckless ways, of the haggard and hollow-eyed man she glimpsed once while holding a tray that Edwin was going to take in after he assisted the blacksmith and his journeyman haul the _thing_ they’d made for Lord Stark into his tower rooms.

Maria’s watching her, a clear question in her eyes, and Pepper shakes her head.

“I don’t _know_.”

\--

The Stark curse is a delicate subject, rarely explicitly spoken of among the upper household staff of the keep, although apparently heavily gossiped about by the lower ones.

What everyone knows, though, is that the lands of the Starks are fertile ground for crops, rich pastures for cattle, thick woods good for hunting, and wide rivers that teem with waterlife – or they were.

The first year Pepper is in the keep, the crop harvest seems sufficient for maintaining the keep, aided by the hunters and fisherman of the river, although both Ana and Edwin are concerned about food shortages, as well as the steady decline of the guildtowns as they struggle with plague and product shortage.

By the second year, though, Pepper’s lessons of reading and summing – given to all the children taken from the town – have branched out to organising linen and mealtimes, managing the keep’s servants and guardsmen, balancing accounts and demands, and overseeing the stores. And it is in overseeing the stores that she begins reading the old records of keep and holding. Decades and decades of land husbandry were carefully noted down, providing insight into the harvests of past times. And during the second year’s harvest, Pepper reads back through the archives and realises that this year’s crops are no better than the last year’s – no better, in fact, than the last eighteen years of harvest.

“It’s been this way since – well, since Lord Tony was born,” she says to Ana. “But the land used to be far more productive – one of the most productive estates in this region. It’s not the husbandry, either – we’re using new techniques that have proven more effective on other estates – sometimes right across the fenceline from Stark lands. We bring in a harvest that’s just good enough, when we should be bringing in much more. Nothing thrives.” Pepper takes a deep breath. “Is it the curse?”

For a moment, Ana’s lips press together, before she sighs. “Yes, I suppose you need to know this if you’re going to continue working here.”

\--

In the time when all stories are told, there was a young lord of high spirits who went hunting in the far-distant woods that lay under the shadow of the blue-misted mountains. And while he hunted there, he met a gold-haired woman who wore clothing as fine as those in any court. She laughed at his teasing, and beguiled him with her charm, and rode like a huntress beside him, for she was faery and didn’t fear to be thrown from her mount.

They dallied for a summer – the last summer before the young lord was due to be married to a woman of birth who had been promised to him in their infancy. And when the summer was done and the call of his lands drew him back, he returned home and was married to the lady without giving the fae a further thought. And within his first year, his marriage came to be a match of affection and not just interest, and they were happy and their lands prospered.

But the Lords of the Mericks went to war with the Lords of the Deuchen, and the newly-wedded lord was called away to fight. And on his way back, he and his men were confronted by the fae with whom he had dallied long ago, and she demanded to know why he had not returned to her.

He blustered until she drew from him the confession that he had been pledged to another, and the fae grew pale with jealousy and wrath, and she cursed him.

All the lords of the Mericks were connected to the land upon the assumption of their duty – relic, so they said, of a time when magic proliferated through the land. To profit the land and those who lived off it, the strength of the land was tied into the leader of those who worked it.

The fae cursed the young lord’s connection to his land – and through his land, to the people he ruled.

His love for the land would wither and die, and the once-fertile land would become hard and difficult. He would take no pleasure in life, his senses and sensibilities dulled, and his wife would grieve at his coldness but he would be indifferent to her pain. His fertile lands would become hard, and his people might eke out a living in their fields, but nothing more. And he would fritter away his existence, bringing joy to no-one.

Pepper tells the story to Maria on their next shared half-day off, huddling up on the guardwalks in the lee of one of the gatehouses. Even out of the wind it’s cold, but they want privacy to hold this conversation more than they want warmth.

“The older guards say that Lord Howard used to be one to watch on the battlefield and in politics before he came back from the war.” Maria muses between bites of flatbread folded around the trimmings of meat and juices that they begged from the cook. “And when I went out with the hunters the other week, in training, one of the older hunters was saying that when she was a kid, even the training hunts would bring back enough game for dinner.”

“But you brought something back.”

“A couple of idiot snow rabbits.” Her tone is dismissive, as though she wasn’t the only trainee who came back with a kill. “I guess people have tried to break the curse?”

“Tried and failed, so Ana says.” Pepper nibbles around the crust of bread – a pleasant change from the pottage or stew that’s their usual meals. “But it’s been nearly twenty years now, and nobody’s tried in an age. Edwin said that the last knight to try is insane.”

“Is there a reward?”

“The estate that belonged to Lord Howard’s father, with all lands and revenues.”

Maria glances out over the guardwalk, out at the light fall of snow covering the land. It never stays long – not as long as the lands further north – but it’s cold enough. Pepper grins. “You’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

She’s seen the longing in her friend’s voice, a yearning for something beyond the estate. Pepper understands, although it’s not something she shares. They’ve got places here – secure, assured places at the keep. Maria works with the guards and trains with the hunters, and Pepper looks after the keep and castle, and learns from Edwin and Ana how to run the Stark estates.

She doesn’t want adventure or a reward or heroism. She just wants to survive and live the best life she can.

“I want to try but I don’t know where to start, and I’m not good enough yet.”

Pepper relaxes a little at Maria’s regretful mutter. At least her friend won’t do anything stupid like run off thinking she can survive on her own – a young woman in a rough world. Then she catches Maria’s sideways glance and blushes to be caught so clearly in her relief.

“I just...I don’t want you to go away.”

“Well, I don’t particularly want to stay here.” Maria slings an arm companionably around Pepper’s shoulder, and the shared warmth of bodies is comforting. “But if I left I’d miss you, too.”

–

That spring, the Lord Protector of the Mericks comes to Stark lands. Assigned to keep the peace between the various Lords and Ladies, as well as to keep an eye on the land, the Protector – Lord, or Lady – may have some land of their own, but their value is largely in the people they call to serve beneath their banner, sworn to keep the peace of the land.

Pepper glimpses him as he bows over Lady Stark’s hand with the grace of a courtier in spite of the greatsword hilt that rises over his right shoulder. Dark-skinned as many men of the Mericks are, with an eyepatch black as coal, he is utterly bald on the pate of his head, but wears a beard much like Lord Tony’s, although not as neatly trimmed. His followers are men and women both, practical folk, who comment on the luxury of Stark, but don’t make use of all the privileges that can be afforded at the keep.

The Lord Protector’s arrival makes the already-busy household staff even busier, and things are so hectic, that Pepper she doesn’t get her half-restday with Maria. Indeed, it’s not until Pepper pushes open the door of her room in the quarters she shares with Edwin and Ana and finds Maria perched on the edge of her bed that she remembers that she was going to let Maria know she couldn’t meet today.

“I’m sorry I didn’t make it out today—” Abruptly, Pepper realises that Maria is glowing, with a light that has nothing to do with her . “What is it?”

“The Lord Protector is taking me as one of his squires!”

“Oh! That’s...wonderful.”

Maria doesn’t seem to notice Pepper’s hesitation. “I couldn’t get away all day. They had us doing some kind of trials – running back and forth, asking us questions, looking for directions and guidance and help... _everything_. But they called us up before dinner – Henny and me.” She flops back on the bed, her hair spreading loosely over the blanket. “They only picked two of us to go with him – one for each of the knights whose squires are just about to start off on their own. And some of the other kids were angry, but they’ll be trained up here in the Stark lands, anyway.”

“And you’ll get to see the world.”

“Well, a little bit more of it than otherwise.” Maria squints up at Pepper, as though just realising that her friend isn’t entirely pleased with the news. “Why the frowny face?”

“Because you’re going away!”

Maria rolls over and pushes herself up on her elbows. “I’ll miss you.”

“Maybe I’ll be too busy to miss you.” She pokes at Maria with a finger. Maria, in turn, mock-slaps her hands against Pepper’s fingers, and they flop fingers at each other until they’re giggling. Then they sit back and look at each other.

Pepper feels a small pang at her heart. She and Maria have been friends ever since they came to the castle, and while the other girl has some rough edges, there’s nobody else who quite understands Pepper as well.

“Do you know where you’re going – at least to begin with?”

“South, I guess. Lord Fury’s got lands in the south, and I think there’s some kind of training regime they take us through on the way.” Maria sighs as she stares up at the ceiling, which Pepper hung with old, roughly-mended linens to lighten the room and give it a little insulation against the cold. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“I wish you weren’t going.” Pepper makes a face as Maria looks at her. “I mean, I’m glad you’re getting what you want, but I wish you could stay here, too.”

“And I wish you could come with us and still have the life that you want, too.” Maria looks pensive. “I’ll try to send word, for what it’s worth.”

Pepper sighs. It won’t be very reliable, and she doubts that either she or Maria will have time to correspond, but...it’ll be better than no contact at all. Maybe.

She lays down beside Maria, their arms just brushing. After a moment, Maria shifts so her hand is in Pepper’s.

They lie there in silence until Ana comes in, gives them a look and hustles Maria off to her quarters. “ _The Lord Protector’s people will be wanting you in the morning._ ”

And, indeed, the next few days are busy with the Lord Protector’s his conferences with Lady Stark and young Lord Tony, and the final preparations for heading south.

Pepper and Maria have no time for more than the briefest farewell on the morning that the Lord Protector and his people ride out.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Pepper informs her friend as Maria handles the gelding that’s been taken from the stables.

“You, too,” Maria says with a slightly rueful look. She hesitates, as though about to say more, then—

“Maria!” The woman who calls her is already moving her mount across the courtyard. “Come or be left behind.”

The girls’ eyes meet, and Maria nods. Then she spurs her gelding to step in with the others, and turns her face towards her future.

And Pepper watches them go until only their dust is left on the road, before turning back to her world within the keep.

 

 


End file.
